Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss

She stands out singularly in my mind as one of the ones who got it—who understood my goals, took my book seriously, and stood by me. Plus, it came out looking beautiful, with reviews from notable trade publications gracing the covers. I signed first, and then my mom, as a witness. Afterwards, we folded the heavy paper, tucked it into an envelope, and brought it down to the mailbox, where so much news, good and bad both, had gone and come before. We put the contract inside, but before we did, we both kissed the envelope for luck. Then we pulled the little door shut, listening for the old, familiar creak.

When, I shit you not, Donald J. Trump followed me on Twitter and, aghast, I blocked him as soon as I saw, my publisher teased me, mock-scolding. Be the sales, not the person. Do whatever it takes. When my book was finally released, the community college where I work hosted a reception in the library. I was really nervous—and really excited.

I dressed carefully, changing my outfit half a dozen times, and I coached my husband on what to wear, what to bring, what to say and not say. He was to be my salesman, my marketing rep, my PR. I wanted to give her a copy for free, but my husband shushed me. My husband and I sold 10 books that night, and only a few to friends. I saw my husband in the back, sitting tall. Here they were, sitting before me, waiting to see what I had made.

Tonight, the plain old library was transformed, not by decorations or music or lights but by me. I was the one who was different now; just like that, the audience made me an author, and I held my book in my hands. After that, I received reviews from several national literary organizations, which helped us to sell hundreds of copies before the book even officially went on sale—and which will, my publisher assures me, help us to sell copies forever. I travelled to Washington D.

I will always treasure the review blurbs my publisher helped me to solicit from grad school professors, writer friends, and even famous strangers I dared myself to query.

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I love when someone reads my words and sees me anew—as a resource, perhaps. For me, those nothings are the Twitter and Instagram accounts, the towering stack of query letters, and those despairing, wine-drenched nights. But I can still remember the February night my dad finished his review copy. My folks drove 12 hours to get to my D. In the end, it all returns to where it began. The book event in my hometown was a roadside signing outside the main bookstore. There was no reading, no fanfare, just a table and a stack of books and a chair.

From that store, I made my first book purchase using birthday money from my grandmother. For decades, I purchased Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, wedding gifts, and baby gifts from there. My parents came, too. We sold all the books. At the end of the sale, we packed up our things, folded up the chairs, and then I said goodbye to my friend, and my dad drove my mom and me home. We are what we eat. We are what we read. We are also, according to Paul Ingrassia , what we drive.

Ingrassia, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the long decline of General Motors, has just published an engaging book called Engines of Change: As its title suggests, the book sets out to examine American aspirations through the prism of a few iconic automobile windshields.

It's a bewitching premise. The book, Ingrassia writes, "isn't intended to be about great cars, fast cars, or famous cars, although it contains some of each. Instead it's about the automobiles that have influenced how we live and think as Americans. The cars in this book either changed American society or captured the spirit of their time. Each of these vehicles was embraced by a specific tribe of Americans — restless farmers, speed freaks, the status-conscious, the status-averse, the wealthy, the thrifty, yuppies, soccer moms, and politically correct movie stars.

Among the icons that fail to make Ingrassia's cut are the streamlined Chrysler Airflow from the s, an engineering marvel that was a commercial flop, and the Chevy Bel Air, which, Ingrassia contends, had timeless styling but lacked the "cultural impact" of the behemoth, be-finned Cadillacs of the late s. By focusing on a wildly revered and reviled styling detail — the tail fin — Ingrassia brings to life one of the most interesting, influential — and largely forgotten — personalities in an industry that has always been loaded with outsized personalities.

We need to talk about Harley Earl. And about how he changed my life and the lives of millions of Americans who have never heard his name. Harley Earl was born in Hollywood, California in and began his career in his father's Los Angeles carriage shop, where he was soon designing custom car bodies for oil tycoons, real estate magnates, and the newly minted stars of the budding motion-picture industry. His customers included Mary Pickford , Cecil B.

For the cowboy star Tom Mix , Earl obligingly bolted a saddle to the car's hood. As Earl dryly remarked about his movie-star clients' cars, "They use them for publicity, you know. Are we as advanced from the standpoint of beauty of design, harmony of lines, attractiveness of color schemes, and general contour of the whole piece of apparatus as we are in the other elements of a more mechanical nature?

As Sloan knew, Earl was doing unheard-of things in an industry that had always been dominated by engineers. Also he was designing the complete automobile, shaping the body, hood, fenders, headlights, and running boards and blending them together into a good-looking whole. The timing was auspicious.

Eleven weeks later, Henry Ford would announce that he was discontinuing production of that boring black box known as the Model T. As Ingrassia tells it, "The cars weren't direct competitors — the cheapest LaSalles cost nearly seven times as much as a two-seat Model T runabout — but the two events represented a passing of the guard. As America transformed from a rural to an urban nation, the dull was giving way to the stylish, the practical to the pretentious, and the old-fashioned to the modern.

Sloan offered Earl a full-time job creating and running the industry's first styling studio. Earl accepted, and for the next 31 years, as head of the industry's biggest and most advanced design department, he took power away from the engineers and handed it over to his stylists, putting his unmistakable signature on more than 50 million vehicles.

After , the appearance of a car — and all other consumer goods — was every bit as important as its performance. Cars would now be sold not as drab utilitarian machines, but as exuberant, ever-evolving expressions of the buyer's fantasies, status, and style. Earl, a flashy dresser and ruthless corporate in-fighter, helped accelerate that evolution by bringing out new models every year, a practice derided by many as wasteful "planned obsolesence.

He was having too much fun roaring around Detroit in otherworldly one-off "concept cars," staging splashy Motoramas, and helping turn General Motors into the richest and most powerful industrial enterprise on the planet. One of the most unforgettable cars in Ingrassia's book was Harley Earl's swan song, the Cadillac. Two other Earl designs that made the cut are the sporty Corvette, which debuted in , and the advanced, economical but ill-fated Chevy Corvair, which was designed under Earl's watch but didn't appear until , shortly after he retired.

These last two understated cars debunk critics like the industrial designer Raymond Loewy , who sniffed that Earl and his Detroit contemporaries were churning out nothing but gaudy "jukeboxes on wheels. But the Cadillac was the zenith of this expression of, depending on your tastes, giddy exuberance or galling excess. More than 21 feet long, slathered with chrome and powered by a plus horsepower V8, the car's most arresting feature was its soaring tail fins and bullet tail lights.

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Nobody was going to out-Harley-Earl Harley Earl. The '59 Cadillac's tail fins, Ingrassia writes, "were so enormous that they seemed lifted right off a rocket ship. It's an unfortunate omission because the tail fin wars revealed, as tellingly as anything ever concocted by Detroit, how automobiles influenced the ways Americans lived and thought at that moment in history. Losing someone we love is one of the most difficult things we will experience during our lifetime, but the grief we endure as a result can be transformative—after all, grief is the ultimate reflection of love.

However, this is easy for me to say twenty years out from my own personal losses and after so many years of helping others.

Reward Yourself

The multitude of emotions that come with a significant loss can be completely overwhelming. Sadness, anger, and confusion may dominate your days—these are the commonly understood symptoms of grief. Yet there is another symptom, often overlooked, that comes with loss: When we lose someone significant, we are reminded of our mortality and of how little control we have over our lives.

This can be a dizzying realization.

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We may begin to feel fearful that we will experience more loss or that we ourselves will also die soon. All of these feelings and fears may feel foreign and very overwhelming. And many people do not understand the connection between their grief and their anxiety until they are really suffering and in need of help. Later, in my career as therapist, I began writing articles about grief-related anxiety and, before long, my office was filled with clients who were experiencing similar symptoms: For some of my clients, that loss was recent; for others, the loss was decades old.

And some of them had experienced anxiety before the loss, but many had not. Either way, they were desperate for help. In my work to help people overcome their grief-related anxiety, I do several things. I firmly believe that a great deal of anxiety is rooted in unresolved grief, so even though I do a lot of work around the anxiety itself, I find that it is also important to go back and trace through various aspects of the loss that a person has not fully processed.

In fact, there are elements of grief that are still being explored, anxiety being one of them.

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Faced with an event nobody can help avoid—a meteor due to strike the Earth a few days later—the five people put in the limelight in this novella all display facets of the human psyche, some noble, some very ugly. Anger whose only outlet is to resort to violence. Acceptance, but not without a cost. Feelings of depression, leading to unexpected reactions.

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The themes dealt with here are harsh and cruel. No sugarcoating, no complete bravery either. The people involved end up discovering some things about themselves they had never suspected, and at the end of every story, they are forever changed—well, "forever" not being meant to last for very long, granted. Said themes may upset some readers, but I found them fascinating all the same, for all the questions they raised.

How would we react in similar situations?

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Would we give in to our darker instincts, or not? Can we be sure, right now, in the safety of our world, that we wouldn't become like one of the anti-heroes in "Grief"? Or would we find out treasures of courage in ourselves, just like the cop who decided he'd die as he had lived, on his own terms, even though this meant dying before the rest of the world? There were moments when I'd have seen the characters a little more developed, though, and this is why I'm not giving it 5 stars. But overall, I definitely liked it.

Aug 14, Adrian Moran rated it it was amazing. Well written and thought-provoking. Grief explores the big question of how to react when the world is coming to an end. Five interconnected stories show different perspectives, different reactions, different struggles to find meaning in the face of a loss so giant that everything we know is about to be wiped away.

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